This wiki will explore whether the phenomenon ‘knowledge management’ in business is a new trend in management. This evaluation is done gradually, by first establishing what knowledge management is and what aspects this concept has, and then evaluating whether the phenomenon is (A) new, (B) a trend and/or (C) a management practice. Each part will build on the knowledge of the previous.
The information in this wiki will be supported by scientific data, drawn from scientific articles, news articles, books and business reports. These sources will be referenced according to the Harvard referencing system.
What is knowledge?
To understand the concept of knowledge management, it must first be clear what knowledge is. There are several definitions. Cambridge dictionary: ‘understanding of or information about a subject that you get by experience or study, either known by one person or by people generally’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Another definition: ‘some “thing” that is constructed by individuals when oppositional tendencies are brought into recognizable proximity through reflection or interaction’ (Ford & Backhoff, 1998).
Although the word knowledge is often used interchangeably with the words information or data, these things are different things. The difference between the three is the scope. Data are sheer numbers, measurements with no meaning in itself. Information is the result of when parts or all the data are used to draw conclusions from. These conclusions are solely based on what the numbers say. Knowledge builds on information by using the information’s conclusions, weighing these against each other and putting them into perspective. I.e. information is processed data and knowledge is information modelled to relevance and usefulness (Kivumbi, 2011).
Although knowledge is clear boundaries in its definition, knowledge can be categorised in two kinds: explicit and tacit knowledge. There are several clear differences between the two, but are both knowledge nonetheless. Explicit knowledge often refers to an end result of a process, whereas tacit knowledge is about the process of getting to the end result. Explicit knowledge is easy to capture and store as its content is in a tangible form and can easily be registered. Tacit knowledge, however, is not easy to capture; it resides often in the owner’s head and the content often is of a complex circumstantial nature. Experience, know-how and know-why are examples of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge can be used as a basis for approaching a new problem, whereas explicit knowledge is unable to do so. Tacit knowledge is often transferred via person-to-person teachings. Explicit knowledge can be taught via documents and other media (Collins, 2013; Dalkir, 2011).
A peculiar characteristic of tacit knowledge is that the more experienced an individual is, often the harder it is for them to articulate their know-how. Individuals new to the scene often have less difficulty to describe the method, as they are typically following a manual or how-to process (Dalkir, 2011). This phenomenon can be explained by Nonaka & Takeuchi’s Knowledge conversion model, which will be discussed in chapter Knowledge management models (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Knowledge is a cognitive skill humans have developed along the evolutionary timeline. It is a skill that transformed the way humans live. As humans were exposed to problems and predicaments, they started to search for solutions. These solutions often consisted of a trial-and-error method, but gradually started to stimulate cognitive activity in humans. This process has led to humans gaining knowledge through learning. As humans found solutions to more and more problems, the problems became more complex and started to build on existing knowledge (Schuppli, et al., 2016). The image below shows the correlation between the size of the human brain and the evolutionary stage of human development.
Source: Le Journal de Net, 2010
What is Knowledge Management?
Reverting to the 20th and 21st century, people have jobs and work in organisations. These organisations are collectives of people, with diverse skill sets and expertise, working in collaboration to achieve the goals of the organisation. The organisation’s existence is based on its participation in the market, selling its services or products. An organisation requires coordination and has departments of people assigned to carry out a specific task.
Today’s economy is a capitalist system with many players. These players compete in the market over customers, profits and market share. This competition has many forms, of which innovativeness is a prominent form. Information and science have brought society to such a high technological standard, that it is becoming increasingly harder to innovate. As knowledge and information are deemed key to realise current and future innovations, they have gained an important role in society.
Increasingly more organisations have come to realise that were they to remain competitively relevant in the market, they must acknowledge that knowledge, information and science are key factors in achieving that and that the organisation must facilitate these factors through appropriate corporate policy. Moreover, as products & services and organisations themselves have become very complex, the phenomenon has grown that employees do not know every aspect of other employees’ work. The same applies for the products or services, making the execution process significantly harder. This is only one aspect of the challenges the corporate world faces. This has led to the realisation that knowledge is a valuable asset in itself.
Source: Credos Institute, 2016
As increasingly more organisations and academics started to realise the value of knowledge, the field of Knowledge Management started to be developed. This field was to give organisations a framework to model strategies how to preserve knowledge as a corporate asset, key to maintaining the organisation’s competitiveness. The root of the problem was pointed to be that employees tried to reinvent the wheel, whilst previous endeavours could have given the researching employee either an answer or a clue. The lack of administration of done projects and the problem of knowledgeable employees leaving the organisation, were deemed underlying causes. Knowledge Management was to anticipate on this by preserving knowledge in the organisation and keep it available to other (future) employees. It is the production of legacy tools and documents that will help the organisation maintain knowledge and fill knowledge gaps by educating new employees with these documents (Dalkir, 2011).
The field of Knowledge Management was developed in the 1990’s. Japanese academics Nonaka and Takeuchi published their article on Knowledge Management in 1991, which is informally seen as the inception of the field. Some academics were pondering with concepts of knowledge management, but these concepts –later to be foundations– did not build a comprehensive framework yet: H. Wells (1938) pondered about a world and society in which knowledge was spread and preserved; P. Drucker (1964) used in his academic paper the term ‘knowledge worker’; P. Senge (1990) used the term ‘learning organisation’ in his scientific article. Soon after Nonaka & Takeuchi’s publication, K. Wiig wrote the first book on Knowledge Management in 1993. In 1996 a cross-industry benchmarking study was done by the APQC (Dalkir, 2011).
As the field of Knowledge Management has changed in focus and structure, the field knows 3 stages it has been in. In the first stage the field focused most on capturing and storing explicit knowledge. In this stage a lot documentation was created and filed, which created a chaotic mass of knowledge. The organisations using it and the academics started to realise that this approach was not leading to the desired result, as users got lost in the chaos and stopped using it. This led to the second stage which radically switched from solely focusing on explicit knowledge to solely focusing on tacit knowledge. The term and phenomenon ‘tacit knowledge’ was explored further and chosen to be the focus of the renewed Knowledge Management discipline. It meant that expertise within an organisation was indexed, which purpose was to connect people who needed each other’s expertise. However, organisations started to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and this led to problems. Organisations saw that a lot of tacit knowledge was not suitable to be turned into explicit knowledge and the knowledge they did translate into explicit, cost a lot of time and effort and resulted in less useful tangible media. The third stage is the current stage, in which the discipline has acknowledge that tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge need to be handled in their own way and that the focus of the field should be a balance between the two kinds of knowledge (Dalkir, 2011).
Knowledge Management is a multidisciplinary field, which has its roots in at least 10 different fields of expertise. Due to this broad base and the changes to the discipline itself, Knowledge Management is both difficult and easy to define. There are over a hundred definitions in scientific literature, of which at least 70 were deemed proper definitions of the field. That the roots of this theory lie in so many fields, contributes to the accessibility to people, as all of them can use their own academic background to understand and relate to the foundations of Knowledge Management. The downside, however, is that Knowledge Management is so broad, that the theory gives room to many different schools of thought and that the end of the area the field covers is vague. One very accurate definition of Knowledge Management comes from Koenig (2012): “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers” (Dalkir, 2011).
Source: University of London, sd
Knowledge Management models
As every business discipline, Knowledge Management has a couple of models, which describe on a deeper level the Knowledge Management system works and once applied to an organisation, the state and conditions of the organisation's Knowledge Management system. The images below illustrate each model.
Nonaka & Takeuchi Knowledge Spiral (1995)
Choo's Sense-making Knowledge Management model (1998)
Wiig's Knowledge Management Matrix (1993)
Boisot's I-Space Knowledge Management model (1998)
Intelligent Complex Adaptive System model (Bennet and Bennet, 2004)
Comment ---- Graphs above need to be more explained. Graphs just "thrown" in.----
Defining the criteria
New
Something is new when it was not existent before. I.e. new is a comparison between two situations and these situations are often separated by time. Therefore, to assess whether something is new, it is a necessity to mention what the timeframe is of comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Trend
A trend is when a certain phenomenon happens repeatedly in different places, but all reinforce each other into a development, towards a certain scenario. To assess whether something is a trend, it is necessary to assess whether the phenomenon or practice is used by increasingly more organisations. The assessment should also have an element of whether other organisations are influenced by other organisations who have implemented it already (Dilenschneider, 2016).
A set of coherent events might seem a trend, but could prove to be a fad. A fad is when the same trajectory is taken as in a trend, in a short time, but is temporary. A fad often receives a lot of attention and is accepted by many. A fad could turn into a trend or be abandoned whole together (Dilenschneider, 2016; Gibson & Tesone, 2001).
The difference between trends and fads lie in its focus points. Trends focuses on a future scenario, where a fad focuses merely on current issues. Trends often have a strategic motivation for its implementation, where fads focus on human engagement. Trends are often supported by research studies being done (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2010).
Management
A practice becomes a management practice when the practice is accepted by the leaders of an organisation, the management, incorporate it in the organisation’s work process policies and corporate strategies (Bloom, et al., 2005). The management is the decision-making department of a business or organisation (Papadakis, et al., 1998).
Knowledge Management: a new trend in management?
In the following subchapters, an assessment will be made whether Knowledge Management is a new trend in management. This will be done by collecting arguments supporting the theory being new, a trend or a management practice and collecting those against, and weighing them against each other. As further reading will show, there is no right or wrong; the verdict is debatable…
Is it new?
The theory of Knowledge Management is relatively young, with its inception in 1995. Although the idea of Knowledge Management was in development for a longer period, Nonaka & Takeuchi’s research can be considered the first appearance of Knowledge Management as a complete theory (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Due to Knowledge Management, organisations that started to implement this method, started to create corporate policies and (re)design th
Source: Amman, 1568
e organisational, all revolving around knowledge at the centre. It is a new phenomenon that organisations design their organisational structure around knowledge (Bagnoli & Roberts, 2013). It is however not new to create policies around information retention; administration within organisations has existed for a long time. Examples for this are salary administration and receipts for tax declarations (Smith, 2016).
However, it is debateable whether Knowledge Management was invented in the 1990’s or already existed implicitly. In the Middle Ages, organisations called guilds existed. These guilds were skill schools where young men were trained to become a master of the guild’s trait. Experienced men, high in the hierarchy, often of high age, educated and supervised the young apprentices (Kieser, 1989). This practical and oral transmission of knowledge can be regarded as a form of Knowledge Management. Another characterisation of implicit Knowledge Management is that arguably a midwife, a traditional healer, community elder or other professions are already the proof of implicit Knowledge Management, as they distilled the lessons of previous endeavours to one optimal manner of practice (Dalkir, 2011).
Nevertheless, the rapid pace of technological innovations has made organisations think about the learning curve of their organisation regarding these new technologies. This phenomenon is new, since the pace of innovations has never been this high and has never overwhelmed people on such a pervasive scale (Lee, et al., 2016).
Is it a trend?
The fact that more and more organisations started to realise and acknowledge that knowledge is a treasurable asset, contributed to the inception of Knowledge Management as a field. This realisation came gradually over time, with individual companies starting to realise this consecutively. This consecutive chain of increasing numbers of companies with this epiphany forms a trend (Stewart, 1991).
The fundamental changes the Knowledge Management field has gone through, can be regarded as steps in a developing trend of a new management form. The destination of the trend’s direction is the evolved form of Knowledge Management in the future. The current changes in the field form a trial-and-error process, which aids the process of best practice distillation.
Although administration is something of all time, organisations are starting to perform increasingly more administrative tasks. These administrative tasks would be obsolete, if they were not filed for a goal. The administrative tasks form an important indicator of how organisations are gathering information; a key aspect of explicit knowledge retention, a vital part of Knowledge Management (Bučková, 2015).
However, Knowledge Management is one of the many business theories introduced in the last 50 years. Many (self-proclaimed) experts –not necessarily with an academic background– have developed a new business theory and hail it as the new guide to success (Barabba, et al., 2002). Businesses and organisations are bombarded with these new business theories and are becoming increasingly ignorant and closed-minded on these topics. This means that not Knowledge Management is a trend, but the influx of new business theories published by ‘management gurus’, which often prove to be fads
in the end (Gibson & Tesone, 2001).
Nevertheless, a key characteristic of a fad is that it is focused on engagement and does not have (a lot of) research to support it. This is not the case with Knowledge Management. Many research studies have been conducted about Knowledge Management and books have been written about it. If Knowledge Management has been a fad, it has now passed that stage and moved on to the integration to the plethora of organisational strategies (Dalkir, 2011).
Is it management?
The decision-making organ of an organisation is the management. This organ assesses the current performance and determine the strategy for the future of the organisation. The management also decides on how work processes should work and come together. This being said, the decision to embrace Knowledge Management as a corporate policy and strategy is only to be made by the management. The invocation and implementation of these policies are a management practice, concerning an organisational overviewing method: also management (Papadakis, et al., 1998).
The motivation behind implementing Knowledge Management in an organisation is often the management’s desire to maintain the organisation’s competitive position in the market. As today’s world involves increasing complexity and contains increasingly complex products and services, many organisations are forced to prepare itself for the challenges ahead. In the competitive market, not implementing Knowledge Management in when other organisations do, poses a big risk for the organisation’s competitiveness and relevance(Gjurovikj, 2013; Lee, et al., 2015).
Apart from Knowledge Management being a tool to influence the workflow within the organisation, it is also an assessment tool, which enables managers to assess how much knowledge the organisation has, how much value it represents and how to manage it. Knowledge being an important corporate asset, Knowledge Management is an Asset Management tool (Kaplan & Norton, 1996; Balanced Scorecard Institute, 2017).
Consequently, the managers are the people who set the strategy for the years ahead for the organisation. The management sets a goal for the future and makes a planning on how to achieve it. However, this can only be done if the managers know what assets the organisation has and can use to reach this goal. Without knowing which contributing assets and slowing assets the organisation has, the management will be unable to make a well-founded decision how to steer the organisation in the desired direction (Lee, et al., 2015).
However, Knowledge Management is also not a management practice. Looking at which departments of an organisation have which responsibilities; it is one of the job tasks of the Human Resources department to foresee gaps in job positions and take preventive actions, and the IT department is responsible for building a good corporate cloud system and a reliable intranet structure.
Conclusion
Weighing the varying arguments on whether knowledge management is a new trend in management, it seems that knowledge management is not a novelty, but it is a trend and a management practice.
References
Aaker, D. A. & McLoughlin, D., 2010. Trends versus Fads. In: Strategic Market Management: Global Perspectives. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons, p. 72.
Amman, J., 1568. Shoemakers. [Art].
Bagnoli, C. & Roberts, H., 2013. Governing strategy and knowledge: tools and methodologies. Journal of Management & Governance, August, 17(3), pp. 535-540.
Boisot, M., 1998. Boisot I-Space Knowledge Management model. [Art].
Bučková, J., 2015. Knowledge Management in Public Administration Institutions. International Scientific Conference: Business Economics and Management, Volume 34, p. 390–395.
Ford, J. & Backhoff, R., 1998. Organizational change in and out of dualities and paradox. In: Paradox and transformation: Toward a theory of change in organization and management. Cambridge(MA): Ballinger Pub. Co., pp. 81-121.
Gibson, J. W. & Tesone, D. V., 2001. Management fads: emergence, evolution, and implications. Academy of Management Executive, 15(4), pp. 122-133.
Gjurovikj, A. B., 2013. Knowledge Management as a Competitive Advantage of Contemporary Companies. Skopje, Academic Conferences & Publishing International Ltd, pp. 482-488.
Kaplan, R. S. & Norton, D. P., 1996. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. In: The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
Kieser, A., 1989. Organizational, Institutional, and Societal Evolution: Medieval Craft Guilds and the Genesis of Formal Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, December, 34(4), pp. 540-564.
Le Journal de Net, 2010. Volume cérébral des Hominidés. [Art] (Muséum d'Aix-en-Provence).
Lee, A. R., Son, S. & Kim, K. K., 2016. Information and communication technology overload and social networking service fatigue: A stress perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, February, 55(Part A), p. 51–61.
Lee, V., Foo, A. T., Leong, L. & Ooi, K., 2015. Can competitive advantage be achieved through knowledge management? A case study on SMEs. Expert Systems with Applications, December, Volume 65, p. 136–151.
Nonaka, I., 2007. The Knowledge-Creating Company. Harvard Business Review, July-August.
Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H., 1995. The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. In: The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Papadakis, V. M., Lioukas, S. & Chambers, D., 1998. Strategic decision-making processes: The role of management and context. Strategic Management Journal, February, 19(2), p. 115–147.
Schuppli, C., Graber, S. M., Isler, K. & van Schaik, C. P., 2016. Life history, cognition and the evolution of complex foraging niches. Journal of Human Evolution, Volume 92, pp. 91-100.
Senge, P. M., 1990. The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. In: The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.
Smith, R., 2016. Bureaucracy as Innovation. Research–Technology Management, January-February, 59(1), pp. 61-63.
Stewart, T., 1991. Intellectual capital: Your company’s most valuable asset. Fortune Magazine, June, 123(11), p. 44–60.
University of London, n.d. Tree of Knowledge Management. [Art] (University of London).
Wells, H. G., 1938. World brain. In: World brain. Garden City(New York): Doubleday, Doran & Co.
Wiig, K., 1993. Wiig Knowledge Management model. [Art].
Table of Contents
Outline
This wiki will explore whether the phenomenon ‘knowledge management’ in business is a new trend in management. This evaluation is done gradually, by first establishing what knowledge management is and what aspects this concept has, and then evaluating whether the phenomenon is (A) new, (B) a trend and/or (C) a management practice. Each part will build on the knowledge of the previous.The information in this wiki will be supported by scientific data, drawn from scientific articles, news articles, books and business reports. These sources will be referenced according to the Harvard referencing system.
What is knowledge?
To understand the concept of knowledge management, it must first be clear what knowledge is. There are several definitions. Cambridge dictionary: ‘understanding of or information about a subject that you get by experience or study, either known by one person or by people generally’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Another definition: ‘some “thing” that is constructed by individuals when oppositional tendencies are brought into recognizable proximity through reflection or interaction’ (Ford & Backhoff, 1998).Although the word knowledge is often used interchangeably with the words information or data, these things are different things. The difference between the three is the scope. Data are sheer numbers, measurements with no meaning in itself. Information is the result of when parts or all the data are used to draw conclusions from. These conclusions are solely based on what the numbers say. Knowledge builds on information by using the information’s conclusions, weighing these against each other and putting them into perspective. I.e. information is processed data and knowledge is information modelled to relevance and usefulness (Kivumbi, 2011).
Although knowledge is clear boundaries in its definition, knowledge can be categorised in two kinds: explicit and tacit knowledge. There are several clear differences between the two, but are both knowledge nonetheless. Explicit knowledge often refers to an end result of a process, whereas tacit knowledge is about the process of getting to the end result. Explicit knowledge is easy to capture and store as its content is in a tangible form and can easily be registered. Tacit knowledge, however, is not easy to capture; it resides often in the owner’s head and the content often is of a complex circumstantial nature. Experience, know-how and know-why are examples of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge can be used as a basis for approaching a new problem, whereas explicit knowledge is unable to do so. Tacit knowledge is often transferred via person-to-person teachings. Explicit knowledge can be taught via documents and other media (Collins, 2013; Dalkir, 2011).
A peculiar characteristic of tacit knowledge is that the more experienced an individual is, often the harder it is for them to articulate their know-how. Individuals new to the scene often have less difficulty to describe the method, as they are typically following a manual or how-to process (Dalkir, 2011). This phenomenon can be explained by Nonaka & Takeuchi’s Knowledge conversion model, which will be discussed in chapter Knowledge management models (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).
Knowledge is a cognitive skill humans have developed along the evolutionary timeline. It is a skill that transformed the way humans live. As humans were exposed to problems and predicaments, they started to search for solutions. These solutions often consisted of a trial-and-error method, but gradually started to stimulate cognitive activity in humans. This process has led to humans gaining knowledge through learning. As humans found solutions to more and more problems, the problems became more complex and started to build on existing knowledge (Schuppli, et al., 2016). The image below shows the correlation between the size of the human brain and the evolutionary stage of human development.
What is Knowledge Management?
Reverting to the 20th and 21st century, people have jobs and work in organisations. These organisations are collectives of people, with diverse skill sets and expertise, working in collaboration to achieve the goals of the organisation. The organisation’s existence is based on its participation in the market, selling its services or products. An organisation requires coordination and has departments of people assigned to carry out a specific task.Today’s economy is a capitalist system with many players. These players compete in the market over customers, profits and market share. This competition has many forms, of which innovativeness is a prominent form. Information and science have brought society to such a high technological standard, that it is becoming increasingly harder to innovate. As knowledge and information are deemed key to realise current and future innovations, they have gained an important role in society.
Increasingly more organisations have come to realise that were they to remain competitively relevant in the market, they must acknowledge that knowledge, information and science are key factors in achieving that and that the organisation must facilitate these factors through appropriate corporate policy. Moreover, as products & services and organisations themselves have become very complex, the phenomenon has grown that employees do not know every aspect of other employees’ work. The same applies for the products or services, making the execution process significantly harder. This is only one aspect of the challenges the corporate world faces. This has led to the realisation that knowledge is a valuable asset in itself.
As increasingly more organisations and academics started to realise the value of knowledge, the field of Knowledge Management started to be developed. This field was to give organisations a framework to model strategies how to preserve knowledge as a corporate asset, key to maintaining the organisation’s competitiveness. The root of the problem was pointed to be that employees tried to reinvent the wheel, whilst previous endeavours could have given the researching employee either an answer or a clue. The lack of administration of done projects and the problem of knowledgeable employees leaving the organisation, were deemed underlying causes. Knowledge Management was to anticipate on this by preserving knowledge in the organisation and keep it available to other (future) employees. It is the production of legacy tools and documents that will help the organisation maintain knowledge and fill knowledge gaps by educating new employees with these documents (Dalkir, 2011).
The field of Knowledge Management was developed in the 1990’s. Japanese academics Nonaka and Takeuchi published their article on Knowledge Management in 1991, which is informally seen as the inception of the field. Some academics were pondering with concepts of knowledge management, but these concepts –later to be foundations– did not build a comprehensive framework yet: H. Wells (1938) pondered about a world and society in which knowledge was spread and preserved; P. Drucker (1964) used in his academic paper the term ‘knowledge worker’; P. Senge (1990) used the term ‘learning organisation’ in his scientific article. Soon after Nonaka & Takeuchi’s publication, K. Wiig wrote the first book on Knowledge Management in 1993. In 1996 a cross-industry benchmarking study was done by the APQC (Dalkir, 2011).
As the field of Knowledge Management has changed in focus and structure, the field knows 3 stages it has been in. In the first stage the field focused most on capturing and storing explicit knowledge. In this stage a lot documentation was created and filed, which created a chaotic mass of knowledge. The organisations using it and the academics started to realise that this approach was not leading to the desired result, as users got lost in the chaos and stopped using it. This led to the second stage which radically switched from solely focusing on explicit knowledge to solely focusing on tacit knowledge. The term and phenomenon ‘tacit knowledge’ was explored further and chosen to be the focus of the renewed Knowledge Management discipline. It meant that expertise within an organisation was indexed, which purpose was to connect people who needed each other’s expertise. However, organisations started to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and this led to problems. Organisations saw that a lot of tacit knowledge was not suitable to be turned into explicit knowledge and the knowledge they did translate into explicit, cost a lot of time and effort and resulted in less useful tangible media. The third stage is the current stage, in which the discipline has acknowledge that tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge need to be handled in their own way and that the focus of the field should be a balance between the two kinds of knowledge (Dalkir, 2011).
Knowledge Management is a multidisciplinary field, which has its roots in at least 10 different fields of expertise. Due to this broad base and the changes to the discipline itself, Knowledge Management is both difficult and easy to define. There are over a hundred definitions in scientific literature, of which at least 70 were deemed proper definitions of the field. That the roots of this theory lie in so many fields, contributes to the accessibility to people, as all of them can use their own academic background to understand and relate to the foundations of Knowledge Management. The downside, however, is that Knowledge Management is so broad, that the theory gives room to many different schools of thought and that the end of the area the field covers is vague. One very accurate definition of Knowledge Management comes from Koenig (2012): “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers” (Dalkir, 2011).
Knowledge Management models
As every business discipline, Knowledge Management has a couple of models, which describe on a deeper level the Knowledge Management system works and once applied to an organisation, the state and conditions of the organisation's Knowledge Management system. The images below illustrate each model.Comment ---- Graphs above need to be more explained. Graphs just "thrown" in.----
Defining the criteria
New
Something is new when it was not existent before. I.e. new is a comparison between two situations and these situations are often separated by time. Therefore, to assess whether something is new, it is a necessity to mention what the timeframe is of comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2017).Trend
A trend is when a certain phenomenon happens repeatedly in different places, but all reinforce each other into a development, towards a certain scenario. To assess whether something is a trend, it is necessary to assess whether the phenomenon or practice is used by increasingly more organisations. The assessment should also have an element of whether other organisations are influenced by other organisations who have implemented it already (Dilenschneider, 2016).A set of coherent events might seem a trend, but could prove to be a fad. A fad is when the same trajectory is taken as in a trend, in a short time, but is temporary. A fad often receives a lot of attention and is accepted by many. A fad could turn into a trend or be abandoned whole together (Dilenschneider, 2016; Gibson & Tesone, 2001).
The difference between trends and fads lie in its focus points. Trends focuses on a future scenario, where a fad focuses merely on current issues. Trends often have a strategic motivation for its implementation, where fads focus on human engagement. Trends are often supported by research studies being done (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2010).
Management
A practice becomes a management practice when the practice is accepted by the leaders of an organisation, the management, incorporate it in the organisation’s work process policies and corporate strategies (Bloom, et al., 2005). The management is the decision-making department of a business or organisation (Papadakis, et al., 1998).Knowledge Management: a new trend in management?
In the following subchapters, an assessment will be made whether Knowledge Management is a new trend in management. This will be done by collecting arguments supporting the theory being new, a trend or a management practice and collecting those against, and weighing them against each other. As further reading will show, there is no right or wrong; the verdict is debatable…Is it new?
The theory of Knowledge Management is relatively young, with its inception in 1995. Although the idea of Knowledge Management was in development for a longer period, Nonaka & Takeuchi’s research can be considered the first appearance of Knowledge Management as a complete theory (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).Due to Knowledge Management, organisations that started to implement this method, started to create corporate policies and (re)design th
e organisational, all revolving around knowledge at the centre. It is a new phenomenon that organisations design their organisational structure around knowledge (Bagnoli & Roberts, 2013). It is however not new to create policies around information retention; administration within organisations has existed for a long time. Examples for this are salary administration and receipts for tax declarations (Smith, 2016).
However, it is debateable whether Knowledge Management was invented in the 1990’s or already existed implicitly. In the Middle Ages, organisations called guilds existed. These guilds were skill schools where young men were trained to become a master of the guild’s trait. Experienced men, high in the hierarchy, often of high age, educated and supervised the young apprentices (Kieser, 1989). This practical and oral transmission of knowledge can be regarded as a form of Knowledge Management. Another characterisation of implicit Knowledge Management is that arguably a midwife, a traditional healer, community elder or other professions are already the proof of implicit Knowledge Management, as they distilled the lessons of previous endeavours to one optimal manner of practice (Dalkir, 2011).
Nevertheless, the rapid pace of technological innovations has made organisations think about the learning curve of their organisation regarding these new technologies. This phenomenon is new, since the pace of innovations has never been this high and has never overwhelmed people on such a pervasive scale (Lee, et al., 2016).
Is it a trend?
The fact that more and more organisations started to realise and acknowledge that knowledge is a treasurable asset, contributed to the inception of Knowledge Management as a field. This realisation came gradually over time, with individual companies starting to realise this consecutively. This consecutive chain of increasing numbers of companies with this epiphany forms a trend (Stewart, 1991).The fundamental changes the Knowledge Management field has gone through, can be regarded as steps in a developing trend of a new management form. The destination of the trend’s direction is the evolved form of Knowledge Management in the future. The current changes in the field form a trial-and-error process, which aids the process of best practice distillation.
Although administration is something of all time, organisations are starting to perform increasingly more administrative tasks. These administrative tasks would be obsolete, if they were not filed for a goal. The administrative tasks form an important indicator of how organisations are gathering information; a key aspect of explicit knowledge retention, a vital part of Knowledge Management (Bučková, 2015).
However, Knowledge Management is one of the many business theories introduced in the last 50 years. Many (self-proclaimed) experts –not necessarily with an academic background– have developed a new business theory and hail it as the new guide to success (Barabba, et al., 2002). Businesses and organisations are bombarded with these new business theories and are becoming increasingly ignorant and closed-minded on these topics. This means that not Knowledge Management is a trend, but the influx of new business theories published by ‘management gurus’, which often prove to be fads
in the end (Gibson & Tesone, 2001).
Nevertheless, a key characteristic of a fad is that it is focused on engagement and does not have (a lot of) research to support it. This is not the case with Knowledge Management. Many research studies have been conducted about Knowledge Management and books have been written about it. If Knowledge Management has been a fad, it has now passed that stage and moved on to the integration to the plethora of organisational strategies (Dalkir, 2011).
Is it management?
The decision-making organ of an organisation is the management. This organ assesses the current performance and determine the strategy for the future of the organisation. The management also decides on how work processes should work and come together. This being said, the decision to embrace Knowledge Management as a corporate policy and strategy is only to be made by the management. The invocation and implementation of these policies are a management practice, concerning an organisational overviewing method: also management (Papadakis, et al., 1998).The motivation behind implementing Knowledge Management in an organisation is often the management’s desire to maintain the organisation’s competitive position in the market. As today’s world involves increasing complexity and contains increasingly complex products and services, many organisations are forced to prepare itself for the challenges ahead. In the competitive market, not implementing Knowledge Management in when other organisations do, poses a big risk for the organisation’s competitiveness and relevance(Gjurovikj, 2013; Lee, et al., 2015).
Apart from Knowledge Management being a tool to influence the workflow within the organisation, it is also an assessment tool, which enables managers to assess how much knowledge the organisation has, how much value it represents and how to manage it. Knowledge being an important corporate asset, Knowledge Management is an Asset Management tool (Kaplan & Norton, 1996; Balanced Scorecard Institute, 2017).
Consequently, the managers are the people who set the strategy for the years ahead for the organisation. The management sets a goal for the future and makes a planning on how to achieve it. However, this can only be done if the managers know what assets the organisation has and can use to reach this goal. Without knowing which contributing assets and slowing assets the organisation has, the management will be unable to make a well-founded decision how to steer the organisation in the desired direction (Lee, et al., 2015).
However, Knowledge Management is also not a management practice. Looking at which departments of an organisation have which responsibilities; it is one of the job tasks of the Human Resources department to foresee gaps in job positions and take preventive actions, and the IT department is responsible for building a good corporate cloud system and a reliable intranet structure.
Conclusion
Weighing the varying arguments on whether knowledge management is a new trend in management, it seems that knowledge management is not a novelty, but it is a trend and a management practice.References